So we’re not the frickin’ Foo Fighters here, yeah? We’re not goddamn Kings of Leon here either, packing stadiums, sharing their songs of perilous lust with thousands of people all hopped up on Corona Extra, making goddamn bank to support their beard oil side hustles, right? We’re just five 30-something Minneapolitan schlubs trying to play a little rock ‘n’ roll across the United States of America, mostly ‘cause we’re getting a little bored of playing the Eagles Club every month, OK?

Touring, for bands of our stature, is more like an existential vacation that’s intended to make memories and build connections while serving as a psychological endurance experiment, one that tests the limits of our social and moral boundaries. And hey, if we make a little cheddar along the way, peddling our new record and slingin’ our T-shirts? If that subsidizes the gas and keeps the light blue American Spirits puffin’, then that’s a big ol’ Al Pacino “HOO-AH!” for us.

I have nothing but respect for musicians who hit the road, especially when they aren’t “the frickin’ Foo Fighters.”

I enjoyed this piece about a band I’ve never heard of, but certainly will give their album a stream later today.

One of the best parts of YouTube Premium is being able to run audio in the background while your screen is turned off.

I utilized this feature heavily this past weekend as I drove back from a long weekend of camping. I got sick shortly before we left, so I drove separately and met my family the next day.

On the drive back, I threw on this video and couldn’t wait to tell my wife about it when we met up down the road at a McDonalds.

If you are completely uninterested in large language models, artificial intelligence, generative AI, or complex statistical modeling, then this video is perfect to throw on if you’re struggling with insomnia.

If you have even a passing interest in LLMs, though, you have to check this presentation out by Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI.

Using quite approchable language, he explains how you build and tune an LLM, why it’s so expensive, how they can improve, and where these tools are vulnerable to attacks such as jailbreaking and prompt injection.

I’ve played with LLMs for a few years now and this video greatly improved the mental model I’ve developed around how these tools work.

I’ve consumed a few pieces of content recently which all seem to converge around a central theme.

A good friend recommended I read the book Hope and Help for your Nerves, a book originally written in the 1960s by Dr. Claire Weekes, because it provides a simple framework for beating the cycle of anxiety once and for all.

I found myself occasionally wincing at some of its dated references¹, but mostly, I found myself unable to put the book down.

Every time she starts a new chapter, she introduces a new character who is undergoing some form of nervous breakdown, and I find myself completely captivated because I can 100% see myself in the vast majority of these people.²

So what is this simple framework for taming anxiety once and for all?

1. Facing (confronting anxiety instead of avoiding it)
2. Accepting (being okay with the situation without adding resistance)
3. Floating (pretending you’re on a cloud, allowing feelings and sensations to come and go without resistance)
4. Letting Time Pass (understanding that recovery takes time)

Today, I’m supposed to be camping with my family, but I woke up feeling horrible, so I stayed back while my wife and kids took off.

After taking a nap, I decided that it was the perfect day to work through my YouTube “Watch Later” backlog.

Near the top of my list was a TEDx talk from Olympian Deena Kastor where she shared her technique for introducing joy into the things we dread the most.

This was the "chaser" to the "shot" provided by Dr. Weekes.

I used to find it easy to introduce joy into my life. I loved running my own business and deciding that we’d spend every single lunch playing Super Smash Bros. for the N64.

It saddens me to admit that for the last few years, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to do stuff like that. Being silly feels challenging, even when it involves playing a game at the playground with my kids. If I’m being honest, it sometimes feels like I’m not worthy of feeling joy or happiness.

Deena shared how she used to hate her Sunday morning long runs because, well, have you ever had to get up at 4am to run 15 miles with a group of people who are physiologically already faster than you?³

She later realized that by giving into the dread, she was admitting defeat even before taking the first step of the run.

After she decided to put on her favorite outfit, eat her favorite breakfast, and find other ways to inject joy into the situation, those long runs became her favorite part of her job. And it made her realize that she could infuse joy into all areas of her life, which ultimately made her life more filled with joy.

Another video on my Watch Later list was from Cal Newport about dopamine sickness.

Cal invents a lot of terms, but I do not want him to stop because these terms seem to always click with me.

One of those terms is “dopamine sickness”, which is when your brain is unable to focus for long periods of time because you’ve spent so much time feeding it quick hits of dopamine whenever you’re bored.

He also coined “deep procrastination”, which is when you are physically unable to do your job, even when you’re under deadlines or other types of pressure.

I said in my original link to this video that his solutions to these problems are “infuriatingly simple”, because to be honest, all of the advice that I’m seeing in all of these pieces is blindingly obvious with the gift of hindsight.

It all seems to boil down to “be an adult.”

And I define “being an adult” as “have a vision for what it is you want to do, and then focus all your efforts on achieving that vision.”

So between those three pieces of media, I feel like I’ve got a good strategy for finally making solid progress on my anxiety and depression issues.

First, I need to be crystal clear on my vision. Who do I want to be? What do I want to do?

When I’m clear on that, I need to figure out what aspects of that vision give me fear. Then, I need to find trusted advisors to help me devise a game plan to address those fears. And when some of those fears inevitably materialize, I need to have confidence that I’ll be able to work through them.

I need to be more rigid about building systems for myself and sticking to them. There are an endless amount of productivity hacks out there, but I need to start simple: time box my calendar at the beginning of the week and hold to those boxes. Include all the boxes necessary to feel like I’m making progress both personally and professionally.

Whenever I get frustrated about a problem, I need to infuse joy into the situation. I need to simplify the problem and take the tiniest of steps towards solving it.

Finally, I need to be more intentional about how I use technology. Intention is tough to define without a vision, which is why I need that vision first. Getting rid of my iPhone is probably a helpful step in defining that direction.

I believe those are the steps I need to take in order to start seeing a decrease in my general anxiety levels and an increase in my happiness with life levels.

Leave it to Cal Newport to show up in my algorithm and give terminology to part of the struggle I’ve faced for several years now: deep procrastination.

Deep procrastination is when you’re physically unable to work up the motivation to do work that needs to be done. Even with external pressures like deadlines, your body is unable to find the drive to do the thing.

This is different from depression because deep procrastinators were still able to feel joy in other areas of their lives, but not work.

He also mentions dopamine sickness, an effect from being constantly rewarded by quick hits of dopamine for an extended period of time.

If you are dopamine sick, you are unable to focus for long periods of time because your brain is literally wired for short term wins, not for deep, difficult thinking.

His solutions to both of these problems are infuriatingly simple: use an organizational system to handle doing these tasks, make hard tasks easier, use time boxing, remember your vision for your life and aim your work toward that.

In the video, Cal says, “we appreciate hard things when we know why we’re doing them.” It reminds of the episode of Bluey called “Ragdoll” where Bandit agrees to buy the kids ice cream only if they are able to physically put his body into the car to drive them to the ice cream place.

After a series of mighty struggles, Bluey is finally able to take a lick of an ice cream cone and is instantly greeted with a moment of euphoria, made possible only after all that hard work.

There are several pieces of content that I’ve consumed today which are all colliding into one potential blog post about how I’m deciding to be done with my crippling anxiety. Maybe after this video, I’ll pull out my laptop and start some deeper writing.

I love videos like these because it highlights just how few major players there are in Hollywood.

I knew Disney was responsible for a large part of my childhood, but until this video mentioned movies like “Sister Act” and “3 Ninjas”, I didn’t realize the full extent.

🫡 to one of the greats.

An internet friend sent this to me when it happened, saying, “this seems like something you’d watch.”

This was so delightful. I love these nerdy, competitive communities who all rally around joy.

This joy was noticeable when Fractal was live streaming his reaction to when Scuti got the crash. He didn’t look mad or disappointed. He looked proud, excited, and happy for his competitor.

Supremely feel good nerdy content right here.

I am a big fan of Deena Kastor. She’s an Olympic bronze medalist and former U.S. record holder for the marathon.

Deena shared her approach for injecting joy into miserable situations in her TEDx talk, which is certainly something I can empathize with as a former marathoner myself.

Doing wind sprints up the hill behind Coffman Union doesn’t sound like much fun, but when you’re doing it with others and trying to make each other laugh while you do it, it’s an experience you’ll never forget.

I am supposed to be camping with my family today, but I feel like death, so instead, I’m gonna lay on the couch and clear through my watch later queue.

First up, this inside look at Apple’s approach to chip fabrication.

It’s videos like these that make me feel as though hardware is an approachable hobby to get into.

Yeah, maybe I don’t know how to put a billion 6 nanometer transistors onto a piece of silicon… but I don’t think I need to know that in order to make something useful.

Also, this was delightful to experience with the hindsight of 8 months. We now know about Apple Intelligence, and we also know how the Vision Pro rollout went.

I haven’t felt like much of an Apple fanboy lately, but this piece made me appreciate how hard their engineers are working to build super useful products.

I personally tried withdrawing cash at three financial institutions in different weight classes, as was told it was absolutely impossible (in size) at all of them, owing to the Falcon issue.

At one, I was told that I couldn’t use the tellers but could use the ATM. Unfortunately, like many customers, I was attempting to take out more cash from the ATM than I ever had before. Fortunately, their system that flags potentially fraudulent behavior will let a customer unflag themselves by responding to an instant communication from the bank. Unfortunately, the subdomain that communication directs them to runs on a server apparently protected by CrowdStrike Falcon.

I have some knowledge of the history of comprehensive failures of financial infrastructure, and so I considered doing the traditional thing when convertibility of deposits is suspended by industry-wide issues: head to the bar.

I’ve ignored the CrowdStrike news primarily because it didn’t directly impact me, and secondarily because I made an assumption that this was yet another example of the joys of late stage capitalism.

I’m glad I read this article, though, because it helped put the crisis in perspective.

While it didn’t impact me, it certainly caused issues for those in my real life. Software truly has reached a point where it can cause massive headaches for large swaths of society.

When a big part of society gets bumped by an outage like this, the ripples of its consequences will surely be felt by everyone at some point down the road.

Second, I gotta stop being so cynical about capitalism. I should stop pretending I’m above it or better than it. Like it or not, it’s the system I have to play in.

It would probably be less stressful for me to accept the game and use it to accomplish my own set of goals.

One of my main goals in life is to build technology that helps make people’s lives better.¹ Say what you will about CrowdStrike, but this article reminded me that it’s because of tools like Falcon that we are provided a society in which we all can live better lives.

So instead of sitting here and (a) ignoring the news and (b) complaining about the existence of bad actors in our system, maybe I should instead do my best to help make our system as stable as I can.

We All Want Impossible Things is a novel which follows the journey of a woman whose best friend is in hospice, living out her final days after fighting a tough battle with cancer.

I started this book a couple months ago and got up to about 70% of the way through before putting it aside.

I'm pretty sure I let it sit because I didn't want to see how it ended. Obviously the death was going to come, but I wasn't quite ready to take on someone else's outlet for grief.

That is, until this past week, when I was in search of something to help me process my own grief.

Last week, I learned that a really good friend of mine died unexpectedly from a heart attack, which set me up for one of the worst mental health stretches I've experienced in recent months.

The last 30% of the book provided some much needed catharsis and meaning. Although the main character's experience wasn't directly similar to mine, it gave me some well considered insights into what love and friendship is all about.

If you're also grieving, I highly recommend this book.